


It's Just Sauce, Mike

by elementalmystique



Series: Graceland 1.04 Pizza Box [2]
Category: Graceland (TV)
Genre: Bello, Charlie's pasta sauce, Eddie - Freeform, Gen, Pizza Box
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:40:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elementalmystique/pseuds/elementalmystique
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pizza Box spoilers. This focuses on the Bello/Mike angle of the episode.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Just Sauce, Mike

**Author's Note:**

> Pizza Box has been the most emotionally charged of the 4 episodes that have aired, and this is my take on the Bello/Mike part of the story. I may or may not have watched the episode 4 times. Or more.

He sat up in bed hugging his knees, unable to go to sleep. The air was warm and fresh as it blew across his bared torso, buttery-soft blankets pooling at his waist, but it did nothing to stop his roving mind. Graceland was silent, and only his thoughts raged onward. 

Today had started out to be so promising. What had happened? 

His mind started to replay the past three days, just as it had been steadily unraveling for the last hour since he had tried to go to bed. 

That scene in the restaurant, where he had followed on Briggs’ heels to a table set with silver and glass and complete with white linen tablecloth. Seeing Eddie’s face half sheathed in bloodied white gauze and medical tape had been a shock to his system like electricity, as well as Bello demanding that he sit alone in enemy territory. He had wished so bad for Briggs to be with him, but the bird had been thrust out of the nest, and he had been left to face the wolf and his loyal hound completely on his own. 

“How is it as a Marine who served you don’t know what a WQB is?” 

Ah, the good ol’ slipup. His mind had whirred furiously, the gears and switches clicking desperately together and somehow managing to generate enough grease to oil the cogs of his hasty cover-up. Meanwhile, the barrel of Eddie’s gun had pressed against his belly like a lover’s lips, a grim reminder of what would have happened if he had been even one second behind on his feet. A lump had formed in his throat and a cold stone in his stomach. 

“If I’m in, should I expect to have a gun pointed at me every time we meet?”  
“I pray that this is the last time.” 

It hadn’t been the last time. 

Poring over mounds of paper and massaging a headache out of his temples. Trying to control the cold clench of fear that started from his toes and worked its way upwards. 

“I need to pretend to train them. Pretend. This guy is burning out people’s eyeballs.”  
“You wanna keep your eyeballs?”  
“Uh. Yeah.” 

If that had only been the hard part of it… 

“I made it clear that this was going to end one of two ways.”  
“Join you, or die.” 

Bello had definitely made good on that threat. He didn’t know how he had managed to keep his hands from trembling, but he’d tucked them against his sides and elbows and pretended that he was talking to someone else… less threatening. Less powerful. Less deadly, even. 

He thought the training session had gone well. So had Briggs. So had Bello. 

But Eddie hadn’t. 

He’d clicked off from his call with Abby. A few seconds later, Eddie had charged out from behind a car and flipped his feet out from under him. Rough concrete scuffing his back, and all the breath knocked out of him, he’d lain paralyzed on the ground for a moment. 

“You’re going to be quiet.” 

Or else this gun will go pop-pop-pop and your life will end on a miserable corner on a dank street, his mind had babbled. 

The man had inserted the barrel of his gun straight into Mike’s mouth. A click of a jumpy trigger finger, and he would have been seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Except that he wasn’t sure that there would be a light for those who shed blood. A scattered thought made its way to his head, one that his mind crazily grabbed at to try and distract him. Eddie had basically raped his mouth with a gun, like a blowjob gone south that would have blown his head off to kingdom come. Even disarming the man and stripping the gun had been a hollow victory. 

He laughed brokenly, the disconcerting sound lost in the darkness of his bedroom. 

“Who are you?” 

Good question. I don’t know who I am. I know who I used to be, who I'm supposed to be. Special Agent Mike Warren, graduated top of my class with honors to boot. I’m investigating a friend and a brother and lying to everyone I’m starting to care about. I’m supposedly a crooked Marine, but I’m really everything that people like you and Bello despise. Yet I have to somehow persuade you that I’m legitimate and I’m real. 

“If I ever see you follow me again, I’ll take your other eye.” 

He’d done more than take the other man’s eye. He’d ended up taking his life. 

“If we spread that rumor, we are writing his death warrant.”  
“No, actually, he signed it himself when he took a job with a guy who pours hot lead into people’s eyeballs.”  
“We’re giving Bello an excuse to do something worse!”  
“No, we’re giving Eddie a chance to walk away.” 

Briggs had sounded so confident, and for a moment there Mike had chosen to believe him. He had wanted to believe Briggs, because he wanted the easy way out. And for that he would always see those dark, angry eyes glaring at him through the darkness. 

Things had seemed to work out shortly afterwards. He’d had a date set with Abby after dinner. And it was Sauce Night. His stomach had been rumbling at the aromatic scent of Charlie’s food, and his nerves had been soothed by the joking banter of the others, even when it had been at his expense. In addition, Briggs’ tossed bone had been more of a boon than anything else. 

“Mike, are you ready for a whole new world of flavor up in your face?”  
“I know you’re a white boy, but come on, man, that sounded ridiculous.”  
“I’m sure the dishes will be here when you get back.” 

Then his phone had buzzed, reawakening his nerves to their state of high alert, and his appetite had been killed in the same second. 

“Today, I teach the lessons.” Bello’s tone had been no-nonsense. “Bring him out.” 

His heart had skipped a beat, or two, or ten, at that moment. 

When the men had dragged Eddie out, Mike had struggled to keep a passive look on his face. The other man had been badly beaten. The bandage had been ripped off his eye, and when the man lifted his head, there was only a glassy sphere in the socket where a functioning, seeing eye had once rotated. Blood crusted his face, and from the pained way Eddie lifted his head and moved his body, there was more hidden damage. 

He had found it hard to blink as Bello had rambled on about power, and Eddie had mumbled to Bello about who Mike truly was. But he hadn’t turned away. Like the captain of a sinking ship, he had simply stood there and waited for the cards to fall where they might. Anticipating the sensation of a bullet in his head, or his eye bubbling within its socket. 

Eddie had been on the bus. He’d tried to take the out, and Bello’s men had dragged him off of it. Mike was to blame. Eddie had had his way out, and Mike had effectively shot him in the head. 

“Give me your gun, Michael.” 

This was it. They were going to shoot him, or maybe even blind him and torture him to find out what he knew. Mouth turning cotton dry, he clamped down on his overactive imagination before carefully unholstering his gun and placing the butt end in Bello’s palm. 

“Let him go.” 

And Eddie was going to be the one to administer justice. It was poetic, to a degree, but he couldn't find it in himself to laugh. 

“I am going to take your eye, piece of trash.” 

He could only remember staring passively back at Eddie, swallowing hard to keep the bile from splashing up his throat. Then Bello spoke again. 

“This is going to end one of two ways.” 

Full circle. He turned to glance furtively at Bello, yet Bello wasn’t even looking at him, but at Eddie. When the man placed the gun in Eddie’s hand and whispered intimately into his ear, the seconds ticked into an eternity. Mike tried to think of a way out, of a plan, of an escape route, but there was none. There was only the battered man standing in front of him and a kingpin who controlled the dozen or so guns pointing this way. 

Then there was a thirteenth gun leveled in his direction — he remembered staring his own mortality in its single, black eye — seconds before Eddie pointed it at the back of his own skull. 

“DON’T!” 

He’d bowed out on his date with Abby. Every time he looked at her and tried to focus on her words, he replayed the day in his head over and over again. His rapier mind that Briggs always praised so highly, ripped into the details of the case, pored over the angles and crevasses of the situation, and focused on the images and sounds that he so badly wanted to purge from his head. He couldn’t feel the softness of Abby’s lips or the touch of her hand or the ocean surf lapping at their hands, and he couldn’t hear the sound of her melodious voice. Instead, he saw a ruined eye and red, lots of red, and he heard a rough Nigerian accent denouncing him to a dubious criminal mastermind. 

It was my fault, he wanted to say. All my fault. Yes, you were just a little bad flunky next to the big bad wolf, you picked this life and all its nasty surprises, and yet you were still a person. A living, breathing soul with thoughts and feelings and desires and fears and hopes. I saw it in your face, in the way all those tears slid out of your one remaining good eye, and in your expression that you wanted Bello to accept the truth and believe you. I saw it in that clench of your jaw and the hopelessness written all over your face right before you put that gun in your mouth and blew your brains away. It was you or me on the line, and I picked me. This is all my fault. Me, not Briggs, not Charlie. Me. All me. I killed you because I had the straight face and the steady eye to lie flat-out to Bello, and he believed me and not you. What does that make me besides a smooth liar? A murderer. I killed you. 

“Now he has his pizza box.” 

Bello had pulled his men and left Mike staring at Eddie’s body, but not for long. Every minute of regret meant another minute of Bello’s suspicion. A voice in his head had ruthlessly reminded him to be careful, to preserve the cover that Eddie’s death had provided them. 

He couldn’t say what kind of man that made him that he could still calculatingly think about the benefits a man’s death would provide him and the rest of Graceland. 

So he’d gone back to base and sat in a chair with his head propped in his shaking hands while Briggs had instructed the tactical team on orders that he couldn’t even remember now. At some point in the night, Briggs had bundled him into the car and driven back while he’d stared out the windshield at nothing in particular. Minutes or hours later, he had been practically shoved out of the car and sent into the Drop for his date. 

Well, that hadn’t lasted long. 

The walk back to Graceland had been a blur. He honestly didn’t remember the people he passed on the street, or the sounds he heard, or the images he saw. Disgraceful, he knew. What kind of federal agent went off the rails on a crazy train like that? 

He had trudged into the kitchen to find the sink stacked with empty pots and pans and dirty dishes, and nobody in sight. He wasn’t sure if he should be grateful that he wasn’t faced with Johnny’s smartass comments and Paige’s sympathy and DJ’s wry humor and Charlie’s sweet kindness. 

He’d missed Sauce Night. Somehow, even after everything he’d gone through, the thought still made him want to cry, and he had absolutely no idea why or how. For heaven’s sake, he’d seen a man die today, watched as Eddie had taken his own life and he had done nothing about it. In fact, he’d been the cause of the man’s death. And now he was upset over a load of dirty dishes? 

It wasn’t the dishes. He was mad and scared and shaken up and guilt-ridden, and none of it was directed at all towards the empty, dirty dishes.  
He’d stared at the empty pot as if it were the Holy Grail, hands braced on the edges of the sink as if to hold himself up, his eyes burning, hearing the silent emptiness of the quiet house screaming at him. To this hour he still didn’t know how Briggs had heard him and come out of his room, because it wasn’t like he had made any noise while he had just been standing there. 

Maybe Briggs had been keeping an eye out for him. 

He dismissed the idea; wanted to believe desperately that the man who he was investigating hadn’t wormed his way into Mike’s heart like a friend. Like a brother. 

“You want a hand with those?”  
“I thought there were no leftovers.”  
“Well, Charlie likes you.” And, it was implied — not that he deserved it — so did the rest of them. The warmth of Briggs’ hand on his shoulder did little to dispel the ice that had been forming deep inside of him. 

Kindness. He didn’t deserve kindness. Not him. Not ever. Charlie’s covered dish with his name written on a sticky note felt like a knife twisting in his ribs. 

“It’s just sauce, Mike.” 

Just sauce. His sauce. 

The red of Charlie’s famous medieval Naples pasta sauce rivaled the spray of dark red blood that had erupted from the back of Eddie’s head. Somehow Mike’s clothes and body had escaped the deluge, even though he knew that his hands should have been stained permanently. 

It only just hit him that Briggs had been trying to comfort him, and he bit down on his fist to keep from emitting a whimper. He didn’t deserve comfort. He didn’t deserve anything that good, not when he had put a man on a slab or under six feet of dirt today. 

Despite the fact that Eddie had been trying to kill him, it still didn’t sit right with Mike, just a sick, twisted feeling in his entire body that made him feel like he had swallowed broken glass. It was gyrating inside of him, and every time he swallowed or moved he could feel pain tearing at him, and he could still smell blood. 

Just as Charlie had put three days and all her effort into her sauce, he’d put three days and all his effort into this recent development of the Bello case. Three days ago, Bello had asked to speak with him alone. Three days later, he was staring down into the empty eyes of the man whose death he had helped to orchestrate. Never mind that he hadn’t wanted this to happen. He had killed a man without even touching the trigger of the gun. 

He hadn’t wanted to cry in front of Briggs. That moment of weakness had come and gone when Briggs had turned his back and walked away, and Mike was all the more grateful for it. Breaking down in front of others was a rookie, undisciplined thing to do, and he couldn’t do it. Not now that he was a part of Graceland and everyone had taken him under their wings and accepted him into the fold. So he’d plunged his hands into boiling water and food debris and soap and forced away the stinging fire in his eyes that had threatened a meltdown. 

Here in the darkness, there was nobody to watch his every move and analyze him for weakness or betrayal of his cover. Here, if he broke down, no one would care. And tomorrow, he would have to bury the pain in his heart and pretend like nothing had happened. 

This was Graceland, after all. He was supposed to be a hardened Marine to people who wouldn’t think twice about shooting him. And to Briggs and the others — whom he had come to care about as deeply as his own life and family — he was supposed to be the fumbling newbie, the kid without a clue. The boy without an agenda. 

He was lying to them all. He had lied to Eddie, he had lied to Bello, and he was lying to Briggs and Charlie and Johnny and DJ and Paige. He was lying to Abby. His lies had become his life. And now, blood had joined that mix. 

Briggs was right. It was his sauce. It was the blood he had spilled and his combination of lies and quick thinking that everyone kept telling him he pulled off *so well* and the others’ kindness and Juan’s assignment and Bello’s ruthlessness and Eddie’s eyes, that one ruined eye that kept staring at him in the darkness, that made up the sauce of his life. And unlike Charlie’s sauce, he knew exactly how this one tasted. 

Spilled blood on his hands and bile in his throat. 

He burrowed his head into his pillow. And this time, he didn’t squeeze his hands into fists where his nails scored his palms, and he didn’t swallow back the lump in his throat, and he didn’t stop the scalding wetness from slipping past the corners of his eyes and down his cheeks.


End file.
